I saw the lotteries and was wondering when old,already deleted characters will be removed from the list of eligable characters?

There is no new information on this subject.

Unfortunately it appears that the web site redesign did not include any updates to the partially working data exports from the game servers. I believe Sapience is trying to get some resources to work on the character exports. It is anybody's guess as to how much success he will have on that front.

Unless stated otherwise, all content in this post is My Personal Opinion.

Unfortunately it appears that the web site redesign did not include any updates to the partially working data exports from the game servers.

Which is very strange, because using the old exports probably loads the servers far more than it has to. Lotteries need a tiny subset of the data that their old character/equipment exports did, and they could easily prune that down further by only fetching data for characters which had A) seen an account login within the past 3 months, and B) seen a character login within the past year.

I have a character on Crickhollow I haven't logged into for over 2 years now, yet he still shows up in these lotteries. Abandoned characters (and especially abandoned accounts) don't really need to be included, IMO. If the player shows back up again and logs in, great! Add them back in.

Which is very strange, because using the old exports probably loads the servers far more than it has to. Lotteries need a tiny subset of the data that their old character/equipment exports did, and they could easily prune that down further by only fetching data for characters which had A) seen an account login within the past 3 months, and B) seen a character login within the past year.

I have a character on Crickhollow I haven't logged into for over 2 years now, yet he still shows up in these lotteries. Abandoned characters (and especially abandoned accounts) don't really need to be included, IMO. If the player shows back up again and logs in, great! Add them back in.

Khafar

I looked thru the developer tracker. Sapience's post is not obvious I am not willing to look at all the posts lately to try and find it. Sapience asked for data to help track down one of the long outstanding character data export problems. Specially the one where some characters do not get their level on the web site increased when they level up in game.

This particular request is not to address the deleted characters in the web database. I believe what happened with deleted characters is that a single fire and forget missile was launched from the game servers to the web site saying that character Gonenow has been deleted. The message got lost. The game server is happy because it told the web server that Gonenow is deleted. The web server thinks that the character is not being played.

We have these same kind of problems with lost update messages in our real time systems. We have a very powerful synchronization and audit task that runs all the time unless the system is in heavy load. Which is checking all the copies against the master to make sure that updates get distributed. When have thousands of partial copies of the database load into various machines so that we do not have to bury the higher level databases in queries for the data we need to access. We need the data within 50 milliseconds. I doubt we could get in time.

There is a cost in human resources to design and test this kind audit code. There is a run time cost. The last time I did a resource cost it was 10% of total system capacity was spend checking. Hence the need to shut it down during heavy traffic to divert the 10% to handling customer requests.

Unless stated otherwise, all content in this post is My Personal Opinion.

I looked thru the developer tracker. Sapience's post is not obvious I am not willing to look at all the posts lately to try and find it. Sapience asked for data to help track down one of the long outstanding character data export problems. Specially the one where some characters do not get their level on the web site increased when they level up in game.

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